A New Project - Creating a "Scrub"

Laying out the dimensions. The brick edging will ultimately be 2 bricks high.

Ready to add the sand. The vegetation that was once inside the planting are has been removed.

 

Finished

It is always a bit difficult to radically change the site conditions you inherit with your property.  On a large landscape scale, it is best to simply go with what you have and to select plants adapted to your site conditions - abiotic factors such as soils and moisture levels.  That said, it is not a large undertaking to radically alter small areas to create conditions that are not present.  In the early days following my move here, I created two separate wetlands in my otherwise "pine flatwoods" site. One of them, a large pot within a plastic swimming pool, is evident in the photos above.  I have written about this and my in-ground wetland designed with a pond liner in earlier posts.  It is rather easy to create wetlands for wetland plants. It is a bit more difficult to create well-drained uplands in a place with typical drainage conditions, but I have created such spots in every landscape I've lived in since moving to Florida in 1987 and it was time to try my hand at it once again in this landscape.

Scrubs and sandhills occur often on ancient beach dunes where sands have been deposited over millennia. These deep sands are often of quartz origin and have been brought here by rivers draining regions of the Appalachians.  These sands are not necessarily infertile, but they are well-drained.  Water that strikes the surface soaks in instead of running off, but it soaks in deeply and the moist sand retains a great percentage of air. Scrub and sandhill plants are adapted to this - not so much the ability to withstand drought as an inability to withstand waterlogged soils. They "drown" in average landscape soil conditions when soils stay too wet for any appreciable time - often during periods in the rainy season where higher temperatures exacerbate this issue.

Scrub and sandhill plants have long fascinated me. I like to have them near me, but many that I originally planted here died within a few months after I added them. The only solution (besides giving up) was to create the well-drained extra-sandy conditions they require.  It's taken me 3 full years to decide where to do this and to then tackle it, but over the past few days I have tackled the initial phases.  I've marked out the site, created a way to build up the elevation using bricks, and added and mixed in the sand to increase the aeration/drainage.  I will begin to add plants once I've given the area time to have the weed seeds germinate and to then pull them. It always is unwise to plant a new bed before the seedbank of weeds has been eliminated.

I've mixed the sand into the upper foot or so of original soil - it was not simply placed on top of it.  Sandhill and scrub plants tend to have deeper root systems than species adapted to moister soils and they require high drainage throughout. By mixing the sand into the natural soil, I also believe that I am making the soil microbes and fertility more available than would have been present in the "clean play sand" I have added to the bed.  

Right now, I have a few plants that I am dying to add. Patience is a virtue as my mother so often said and that is true in this case for certain.  The inclination always is to plant it with everything I've been missing, but the planting area is not extensive and these plants prefer to have space between them.  I will most certainly have to leave certain things out... The task ahead is to decide which ones are the most important to me.  I will be adding some woody mints for sure and post about it as things take shape.